A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with - Early Modern Texts

The Rights of Woman Mary Wollstonecraft 8: Sexual notions about reputation
[A paragraph introducing the extremely voluptuous man,
‘the lustful prowler’, and his ways of satisfying his sexual
appetite. Then:]
To satisfy this type of man, women are made systematically
voluptuous, and though they may not all take their
libertinism as far as the man does, still this heartless interaction
with males that they allow themselves depraves
both sexes: the taste of men is vitiated, and women of
all classes naturally adapt their behaviour to gratify the
taste by which they obtain pleasure and power. In this way
women become weaker in mind and body than they ought
to be. . . .and don’t have enough strength to discharge the
first duty of a mother; so they sacrifice to lasciviousness the
parental affection that ennobles instinct, and either destroy
the embryo in the womb or throw it out when it has been
born. [MW also builds into that sentence the thesis that ‘bearing and
nursing children is one of the grand ends of women’s existence’.] Nature
demands respect in everything, and those who violate her
laws seldom violate them with impunity. The weak enervated
women who particularly catch the attention of libertines are
unfit to be mothers, though they may conceive; so that the
rich sensualist who has rioted among women, spreading
depravity and misery, when he wants to perpetuate his name
receives from his wife only a half-formed being that inherits
both its father’s and mother’s weakness. [That sentence is
verbatim MW.]
. . . .I have already remarked that men ought to maintain
the women whom they have seduced; this would be one
means of reforming female manners and ·by giving disgraced
women an alternative to prostitution· stopping an abuse
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that has an equally fatal effect on population and morals.
Another ·means of reforming female manners·—an equally
obvious one—would be to turn the attention of woman to the
real virtue of chastity. A woman’s reputation may be white
as the driven snow, but she hasn’t much claim to respect for
her modesty if she smiles on the libertine while spurning the
victims of his lawless appetites and their own folly.
Besides, she has a taint of the same folly when she
studiously adorns her person [see Glossary] only to be seen by
men, to excite respectful sighs and all the idle homage of
what is called ‘innocent gallantry’. Women who really respect
virtue for its own sake won’t look for compensation in ·the
coin of· vanity for the self-denial they have to practise to
preserve their reputation, nor will they associate with men
who set reputation at defiance.
The two sexes corrupt each other and improve each other.
I believe this to be an indisputable truth, and I extend
it to every virtue. Chastity, modesty, public spirit, and
all the noble train of virtues on which social virtue and
happiness are built, should be understood and cultivated
by all mankind—otherwise they will be cultivated to little
effect. And instead of providing vicious or idle people with
a pretext for violating some sacred duty by saying that it is
a duty for only one of the sexes, it would be wiser to show
that nature has not drawn any line here, for the unchaste
man doubly defeats the purpose of nature by rendering
women barren and destroying his own constitution, though
he avoids the shame that pursues the crime in the other
sex. [MW is implying here that the unchaste man defeats the purpose
of nature by getting syphilis and by spreading it.]. . . .